Xero partners UOB to let small businesses manage their cashflow

ONLINE accounting software Xero on Wednesday announced an integration with local lender UOB to help small businesses here manage their cashflow.

With this initiative, small business customers who bank with UOB will be able to integrate their bank accounts with Xero and choose to have their bank transactions sent automatically from UOB to Xero every day through a secure connection.

This will allow small businesses to manage their cashflow from within Xero, allowing them to check which customers have paid their bills overnight, and which bills from suppliers they need to pay. It will save small businesses the time and inconvenience of having to manually download statements and import them into their Xero subscription.

The integration with UOB is the latest for Xero of more than 80 financial institution integrations around the world to build a financial web that saves small businesses time and administration when dealing with their finances.

On Tuesday, UOB launched Singapore's first cloud-based, integrated solution, BizSmart, which is meant to help small businesses, especially those in the retail industry, handle their administrative work more efficiently.

According to the bank, BizSmart was designed in response to the 2016 UOB Small Business Survey that found four out of five respondents spend at least four days a month on administrative work, mainly on business development paperwork (60 per cent) and inventory management (45 per cent).

Seven in 10 small and medium businesses (SMEs) polled had said they still use multiple software programmes to manage their business processes instead of using integrated software solutions.

Three in four said they believed that the time spent on administrative work could be better used on improving their company's bottom line.

The survey polled 162 companies comprising UOB and non-UOB customers with an annual turnover of S$40 million and below.